There is a new order out from the Cheney administration that any U.S. enemy in Iraq is now to be called ‘Al-Qaeda’. As Glenn Greenwald points out, Bush himself and various reports have said on the record that only some 5% of the resistance in Iraq is of ‘Al-Qaeda’ ideology or has franchized that brand.

Still, since about two weeks nearly every U.S. report from Iraq, especially on the Baquba operation, talks about ‘Al-Qaeda’. Today’s NYT piece on Iraq uses the word ‘Qaeda’ 23 times.

Why is this so?

One reason of course is that Michael R. Gordon, a partisan former co-writer of Judith Miller’s WMD scare fiction, is currently embedded with the military in Baquba and contributed to the piece.

That’s only one bad apple, but as Glenn shows, other like CNN and the Washington Post also have caught on to the recent ‘Qaeda’ mania. There is a barrel of bad apples.

The best answer I have found is in a Democracy Now interview with ex-Marine Josh Rushing, who was spokesman for the Marines in CENTCOM during the start of the Iraq war. Rushing was portrait in the movie Control Room.

He says:

[The reporters] would ask me before I would go on air live, “Are there any messages you want to get across today?” Well, yeah. My boss comes straight from the White House, and they have the messages of the day, and so they would give it to us. So I’d say, “Sure. WMD, regime change, ties with terrorism.” And they go, “OK. Well, I’ll ask you these questions, so we can get those answers out.” And they set it all up.
[…]
[Fox and NBC] were probably the worst about it, because those two were the most competitive about wanting access. I think they saw this as kind of part of the game. So we would go on live. They would ask me, you know, the staged questions. They would pat me on the back and thank me for my service.

The whole setup that gives us all the ‘Qaeda’ stuff is about getting access. It is what drives some reporters to repeat every lie the administration feeds them. For their obedient service, they will be allowed an exclusive once a while. Some sensational lie that can run on the front page and lift their personal market value.

Reporters who do not stick to this system, like those in the McClatchy (former Knight-Ridder) Washington bureau, will be cut off. They get bared from government airplanes and, without access to senior officials, their reporting has to rely on second level sources.

The irony is that this consistently makes their news-product the better one. Being shunned from access to the propaganda center, they do report the real reality.

But the personal motive of the reporter still doesn’t explain why the NYT, CNN, Fox and NBC prefer such reporters "with access". Do they believe that the once-in-a-while crumb of a sensational exclusive lie really help their longterm bottom line?

If so, they are seriously mistaken.